CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2019-11763 — Failure to correctly handle null bytes when processing HTML entities resulted in Firefox incorrectly parsing these entities
Failure to correctly handle null bytes when processing HTML entities resulted in Firefox incorrectly parsing these entities. This could have led to HTML comment text being treated as HTML which could have led to XSS in a web application under certain conditions. It could have also led to HTML entities being masked from filters - enabling the use of entities to mask the actual characters of interest from filters. This vulnerability affects Firefox < 70, Thunderbird < 68.2, and Firefox ESR < 68.2.
- Severity
- Medium
- CVSS
- 6.1 (3.1)
- Published
- 2020-01-08
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- browser
- Weaknesses
- CWE-79
Affected products
- mozilla / firefox
- mozilla / firefox_esr
- mozilla / thunderbird
- canonical / ubuntu_linux / 16.04
Matched remediation archetype
Cross-site scripting and unsafe browser output
This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.
Check exposure
- Trace reflected, stored, and DOM-derived untrusted values into HTML, attributes, URLs, styles, scripts, and client-side template sinks.
- Identify affected origins, authenticated user roles, sensitive browser capabilities, and where content is shared across tenants.
- Review framework escaping, rich-text sanitization, legacy templates, and client-side rendering paths.
Remediate safely
- Use context-aware framework output encoding and safe DOM APIs; keep untrusted data out of executable contexts.
- Sanitize intentionally supported markup with a maintained allowlist policy and validate URLs and attributes separately.
- Update affected rendering components and add tests for every output context using inert sentinel markup.
Authoritative sources
Complete CVE record and remediation plan
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